A new profile on Facebook? No, it's spam promoting the Toronto Drug Store

Filed Under: Facebook, Featured, Spam

If you receive an email, apparently from Facebook, telling you that you have a new kind of profile - don't rush to click on the link.

Emails have been spammed out with the subject line "You have a new profile", which at first glance might appear as though they really are from the world's largest social networking site.

Here's a typical example of just such an email:

Email claiming to come from Facebook

If you look closely, you'll notice that the spammers did a bad job of forging the "From:" address in that email, but if you hover your mouse over the links contained inside the email you'll see more evidence that something strange is going on.

Surprise surprise.. you're not really taken to Facebook if you click on the links.

Instead your browser is redirected via an intermediary site. When our labs tested the link they ended up seeing a familiar sight - our "old friends" running that most infamous Canadian Pharmacy, the Toronto Drug Store.

Canadian pharmacy website

No doubt whoever is behind this latest spam campaign is earning commission from traffic that they drive to the drugs website, in particular if that traffic then buys a wheelbarrow-load of Viagra and Cialis.

Spam is a nuisance, of course, but as we have explained before - things could have been a lot worse.

The link in the email could have resulted in your computer becoming infected by malware, or your browser being taken to a lookalike Facebook site designed to phish your password.

Take care folks.

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One Response to A new profile on Facebook? No, it's spam promoting the Toronto Drug Store

  1. Freida Gray says:

    It seems to me that the spam message is similar to what Facebook put out when they changed to the Timeline profiles.If someone is against the Timeline they may click the link thinking that Facebook has done something they rarely do___ change a change they made.

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About the author

Graham Cluley has worked in the computer security industry for more than 20 years, developing anti-virus software and doing quite a lot of talking about internet threats. He's won awards for his blogging, but is proudest of the text adventure games he wrote when he was still wearing short trousers. You can learn more about those (the games, not the trousers) at grahamcluley.com. Send Graham an email, subscribe to his updates on Facebook, follow him on Twitter and App.net, and circle him on Google Plus for regular updates.